Incredible beauty and shocking brutality co-exist in Terence Davies's Scottish melodrama, Sunset Song

 Terence Davies's Sunset Song (2015), based on the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, has the classic beauty of over Davies films, in this case to the extreme, with its many wide-screen shots of the Scottish landscape across the seasons and in various forms of inclement weather known well to anyone who's lived in or even visited Scotland - plus some extraordinary interior of the farm house and the outbuildings on a Scottish one-family planting and dairy operation, scenes with lighting that can only remind your of a Vermeer (props to Michael McDonald for cinematography) - all this and a pretty good melodrama of a plot, with amazing scenes of life throughout the farming community - wedding celebration, funeral services - as well as some scenes of almost unbearable tension (getting the horses into the barn during a midnight thunderstorm) & brutality (see for yourself). The story line, w/out spoilers, involves a few years in the life of a young woman, Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), as she navigates family tensions in their overcrowded farmhouse dominated by the brute of a father, leading to shocking tragic deaths and ultimately her independence and then marriage to a seemingly benevolent young man from the village obvious in awe of her poise and beauty and then, as w/ SO many British films, the war intrudes and her husband is changed in dramatic (and to be honest not entirely credible) ways that threaten her life and her child's. The plot carries us along nicely, and that's all that we need to otherwise enjoy this film for its capacity to capture both the natural beauty of the Scottish lands and the look and feel of the hard life of the small farmer - the film set ca 1915 but maybe the same story could hold today. One drawback: for most American viewers the Scottish language or accent will make this feel like a film in a foreign language; some may opt for closed caption, though we decided to decipher as best we could and not intrude on the beauty of the imagery.